April 14, 2020 
The eCommerce ecosystem is witnessing a rapid yet consistent paradigm shift. Technological advancements, innovations in the eCommerce strategies, platforms, and tools can be considered as the key drives of the paradigm shift.
The evolving customer expectation is another catalyst behind the changes in the eCommerce space. Today’s customers are tech-savvy and have the preference to consume information on-the-go in a holistic manner.
When it comes to viewing products on eCommerce platforms, customers demand a seamless, and contextual product experience throughout the sales outlets. Here comes the role of product experience management.
Role of Product Experience Management
Product experience management enables modern retailers and eCommerce business owners to deliver consistent customer experience by delivering contextual product information across the sales, and marketing channels. This goes a long mile in ensuring greater customer satisfaction, customer-brand loyalty, and further can be translated to a boost in the conversion rate.
Studies highlight that approximately 85% of customers rate product information as the top feature they look for prior to making the purchase decision. Product experience management aims at delivering the requisite product information in context to match the customers’ buying experience across versatile touchpoints.
It plays a substantial role in enabling the eCommerce players to establish a much-desired emotional connection with their target buyer base. While product information management essentially defines the goods/services of any business, product experience management depicts the ‘how’ factor to establish the customer-brand connection.
Before we delve deeper, let’s understand what does product experience management comprise?
Content, Context, Conversion – The three pillars of product experience management
Content
Today’s buyers browse through endless platforms, and pages before making a product purchase decision. They rely on their online search, customer, and peer reviews about a particular product and more so on the product information.
This concludes that product information or product content has the potential to make or break a customers’ brand perception, and eventually will impact the conversion. Thus, eCommerce owners should strategize to make product content available throughout their sales outlets in a compelling, and consistent manner.
Context
The medium or sales channel is another major aspect to consider when eCommerce owners aim at delivering near-perfect product experience to their target customers.
The product information delivery, strategy, and approach must be tailored according to the channel or delivery medium to make more sense to the end customer.
Conversion
A famous saying goes as “the things that can’t be measured, can’t be managed”. So, if eCommerce owners aim at boosting their product experience, they must first keep a tab on their product performances, how customers are relating to their products, customer interaction patterns, and history, etc.
These insights will help them customize their product data in an efficient manner to boost customers’ product engagement and experience.
Now that we have understood the pillars of product experience management, let’s learn about how product experience management and product information management are related.
Relationship between PXM and PIM
To start with, a product information management (PIM) solution creates a centralized hub for recording product information. It eliminates the deep-rooted information silos existing in eCommerce applications.
Besides, it enables easy, universal access to centralized product data for all stakeholders to access, update, manage product information.
A PIM application is central to the evolved customer purchase journey and serves as the foundation of a transformed product experience. However, product experience management is the process of delivering product information to gen-Z buyers in a way that’s both appropriate to the channel and personalized.
Product experience management integrates data from several touchpoints, such as CRM, ERP, and marketing automation solutions, as well as contextual data such as ratings and reviews from other customers. It enables the eCommerce owners to help the buyers view the information they want at the right time in the right channel.
Key Advantages of Product Experience Management
By connecting their product data with customer behavior data can enable eCommerce businesses to improve their understanding of customers.
Further, they can tailor their brand, product communications, service, and personalize their interactions on an individual level. Some of the key benefits of product experience management are:
- Making more meaningful product purchase recommendations inspired by customer preferences, and demands
- Improving the omnichannel customer experience
- Offering the right product information at the right touchpoint in the right stage of the purchase journey
- Targeting product information more precisely backed by customers’ patterns, and past interactions
- Promoting better supplier relationships
Why Product Experience Management is considered as the future of eCommerce
As we have already covered in this article, product content has the potential to make or break eCommerce success.
So, an erroneous or inadequate product description may prove to be fatal to the presentation of the product and its optimization in digital channels; and drastically reduce an eCommerce owner’s ability to reach the right buyer at the right time.
At such juncture, product experience management allows all product information to be gathered, standardized, enriched and distributed efficiently. In addition, it will enable eCommerce players to learn more about each product, such as what information or content it’s lacking and where it’s being ineffective.
Such insight will further enable them to adapt their products to customer responses, to the market and the evolving demand across various channels.
Conclusion
The eCommerce ecosystem is evolving at a rapid pace. To stay at the pinnacle, eCommerce owners must take all the strategic and execution initiatives to deliver an optimal product experience. They must leverage solutions such as Product Information Management (PIM) systems, Digital Asset Management systems to stay top-notch.
For further queries on product experience management, do get in touch with the experts at Vinculum, today!
